Etymology and terminology

The word "anarchism" is composed from the word "anarchy" and the suffix -ism,[24] themselves derived respectively from the Greek ἀναρχία,[25] i.e. anarchy[26][27][28] (from ἄναρχος, anarchos, meaning "one without rulers";[29] from the privative prefix ἀν- (an-, i.e. "without") and ἀρχός, archos, i.e. "leader", "ruler";[30] (cf. archon or ἀρχή, arkhē, i.e. "authority", "sovereignty", "realm", "magistracy")[31]) and the suffix -ισμός or -ισμα (-ismos, -isma, from the verbal infinitive suffix -ίζειν, -izein).[32] The first known use of this word was in 1539.[33] Various factions within the French Revolution labelled opponents as anarchists (as Maximilien Robespierre did the Hébertists)[34] although few shared many views of later anarchists. There would be many revolutionaries of the early nineteenth century who contributed to the anarchist doctrines of the next generation, such as William Godwin and Wilhelm Weitling, but they did not use the word "anarchist" or "anarchism" in describing themselves or their beliefs.[35]

The first political philosopher to call himself an anarchist was Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, marking the formal birth of anarchism in the mid-nineteenth century. Since the 1890s and beginning in France,[36] the term "libertarianism" has often been used as a synonym for anarchism[37] and was used almost exclusively in this sense until the 1950s in the United States,[38] though its use as a synonym is still common outside the United States.[39] On the other hand, some use libertarianism to refer to individualistic free market philosophy only, referring to free market anarchism as libertarian anarchism.[40][41]

As part of the political turmoil of the 1790s in the wake of the French Revolution, William Godwin developed the first expression of modern anarchist thought.[61][62] According to Peter Kropotkin, Godwin was "the first to formulate the political and economical conceptions of anarchism, even though he did not give that name to the ideas developed in his work"[43] while Godwin attached his anarchist ideas to an early Edmund Burke.[63]

William Godwin, "the first to formulate the political and economical conceptions of anarchism, even though he did not give that name to the ideas developed in his work"[43]

Godwin is generally regarded as the founder of the school of thought known as philosophical anarchism. He argued in Political Justice (1793)[62][64] that government has an inherently malevolent influence on society and that it perpetuates dependency and ignorance. He thought that the spread of the use of reason to the masses would eventually cause government to wither away as an unnecessary force. Although he did not accord the state with moral legitimacy, he was against the use of revolutionary tactics for removing the government from power. Rather, he advocated for its replacement through a process of peaceful evolution.[62][65]

His aversion to the imposition of a rules-based society led him to denounce as a manifestation of the people's "mental enslavement" the foundations of law, property rights and even the institution of marriage. He considered the basic foundations of society as constraining the natural development of individuals to use their powers of reasoning to arrive at a mutually beneficial method of social organisation. In each case, government and its institutions are shown to constrain the development of our capacity to live wholly in accordance with the full and free exercise of private judgement.

The French Pierre-Joseph Proudhon is regarded as the first self-proclaimed anarchist, a label he adopted in his groundbreaking work What is Property?, published in 1840. It is for this reason that some claim Proudhon as the founder of modern anarchist theory.[66] He developed the theory of spontaneous order in society, where organisation emerges without a central coordinator imposing its own idea of order against the wills of individuals acting in their own interests. His famous quote on the matter is "Liberty is the mother, not the daughter, of order". In What is Property?, Proudhon answers with the famous accusation "Property is theft". In this work, he opposed the institution of decreed "property" (propriété), where owners have complete rights to "use and abuse" their property as they wish.[67] He contrasted this with what he called "possession", or limited ownership of resources and goods only while in more or less continuous use. However, Proudhon later added that "Property is Liberty" and argued that it was a bulwark against state power.[68] His opposition to the state, organised religion and certain capitalist practices inspired subsequent anarchists and made him one of the leading social thinkers of his time.

In Europe, harsh reaction followed the revolutions of 1848, during which ten countries had experienced brief or long-term social upheaval as groups carried out nationalist uprisings. After most of these attempts at systematic change ended in failure, conservative elements took advantage of the divided groups of socialists, liberals and nationalists along with anarchists to prevent further revolt.[74] In Spain, Ramón de la Sagra established the anarchist journal El Porvenir in La Coruña in 1845 which was inspired by Proudhon's ideas.[75] The Catalan politician Francesc Pi i Margall became the principal translator of Proudhon's works into Spanish[76] and later briefly became President of Spain in 1873 while being the leader of the Federal Democratic Republican Party. According to George Woodcock: "These translations were to have a profound and lasting effect on the development of Spanish anarchism after 1870, but before that time Proudhonian ideas, as interpreted by Pi, already provided much of the inspiration for the federalist movement which sprang up in the early 1860's".[77] According to the Encyclopædia Britannica: "During the Spanish revolution of 1873, Pi y Margall attempted to establish a decentralised, or "cantonalist," political system on Proudhonian lines".[75]

Anarchist historian George Woodcock reports: "The annual Congress of the International had not taken place in 1870 owing to the outbreak of the Paris Commune, and in 1871 the General Council called only a special conference in London. One delegate was able to attend from Spain and none from Italy, while a technical excuse – that they had split away from the Fédération Romande – was used to avoid inviting Bakunin's Swiss supporters. Thus only a tiny minority of anarchists was present, and the General Council's resolutions passed almost unanimously. Most of them were clearly directed against Bakunin and his followers".[87] In 1872, the conflict climaxed with a final split between the two groups at the Hague Congress, where Bakunin and James Guillaume were expelled from the International and its headquarters were transferred to New York. In response, the federalist sections formed their own International at the St. Imier Congress, adopting a revolutionary anarchist programme.[88]

The Paris Commune was a government that briefly ruled Paris from 18 March (more formally, from 28 March) to 28 May 1871. The Commune was the result of an uprising in Paris after France was defeated in the Franco-Prussian War. Anarchists participated actively in the establishment of the Paris Commune. They included Louise Michel, the Reclus brothers (Élie Reclus and Élisée Reclus) and Eugene Varlin (the latter murdered in the repression afterwards). As for the reforms initiated by the Commune, such as the re-opening of workplaces as co-operatives, anarchists can see their ideas of associated labour beginning to be realised. Moreover, the Commune's ideas on federation obviously reflected the influence of Proudhon on French radical ideas. The Commune's vision of a communal France based on a federation of delegates bound by imperative mandates issued by their electors and subject to recall at any moment echoes Bakunin's and Proudhon's ideas (Proudhon, like Bakunin, had argued in favour of the "implementation of the binding mandate" in 1848 and for federation of communes), thus both economically and politically the Paris Commune was heavily influenced by anarchist ideas.[89] George Woodcock states that "a notable contribution to the activities of the Commune and particularly to the organization of public services was made by members of various anarchist factions, including the mutualists Courbet, Longuet, and Vermorel, the libertarian collectivists Varlin, Malon, and Lefrangais, and the bakuninists Elie and Elisée Reclus and Louise Michel".[87]

A sympathetic engraving by Walter Crane of the executed anarchists of Chicago after the Haymarket affair, which is generally considered the most significant event for the origin of international May Day observances

In response, unions across the United States prepared a general strike in support of the event.[91] On 3 May, a fight broke out in Chicago when strikebreakers attempted to cross the picket line and two workers died when police opened fire upon the crowd.[92] The next day on 4 May, anarchists staged a rally at Chicago's Haymarket Square.[93] A bomb was thrown by an unknown party near the conclusion of the rally, killing an officer.[94] In the ensuing panic, police opened fire on the crowd and each other.[95] Seven police officers and at least four workers were killed.[96] Eight anarchists directly and indirectly related to the organisers of the rally were arrested and charged with the murder of the deceased officer. The men became international political celebrities among the labour movement. Four of the men were executed and a fifth committed suicide prior to his own execution. The incident became known as the Haymarket affair and was a setback for the labour movement and the struggle for the eight-hour day. In 1890, a second attempt—this time international in scope—to organise for the eight-hour day was made. The event also had the secondary purpose of memorialising workers killed as a result of the Haymarket affair.[97] Although it had initially been conceived as a once-off event, by the following year the celebration of International Workers' Day on May Day had become firmly established as an international worker's holiday.[91]

In 1907, the International Anarchist Congress of Amsterdam gathered delegates from 14 different countries, among which were important figures of the anarchist movement, including Errico Malatesta, Pierre Monatte, Luigi Fabbri, Benoît Broutchoux, Emma Goldman, Rudolf Rocker and Christiaan Cornelissen. Various themes were treated during the Congress, in particular concerning the organisation of the anarchist movement, popular education issues, the general strike or antimilitarism. A central debate concerned the relation between anarchism and syndicalism (or trade unionism). Malatesta and Monatte were in particular disagreement themselves on this issue as the latter thought that syndicalism was revolutionary and would create the conditions of a social revolution while Malatesta did not consider syndicalism by itself sufficient.[98] He thought that the trade union movement was reformist and even conservative, citing as essentially bourgeois and anti-worker the phenomenon of professional union officials. Malatesta warned that the syndicalists aims were in perpetuating syndicalism itself, whereas anarchists must always have anarchy as their end and consequently refrain from committing to any particular method of achieving it.[99]

In 1881, the Spanish Workers Federation was the first major anarcho-syndicalist movement—anarchist trade union federations were of special importance in Spain. The most successful was the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (National Confederation of Labour, CNT), founded in 1910. Before the 1940s, the CNT was the major force in Spanish working class politics, attracting 1.58 million members at one point and playing a major role in the Spanish Civil War.[100] The CNT was affiliated with the International Workers Association, a federation of anarcho-syndicalist trade unions founded in 1922, with delegates representing two million workers from 15 countries in Europe and Latin America. In Latin America in particular, "[t]he anarchists quickly became active in organising craft and industrial workers throughout South and Central America, and until the early 1920s most of the trade unions in Mexico, Brazil, Peru, Chile, and Argentina were anarcho-syndicalist in general outlook; the prestige of the Spanish C.N.T. as a revolutionary organisation was undoubtedly to a great extent responsible for this situation. The largest and most militant of these organisations was the Federación Obrera Regional Argentina [...] it grew quickly to a membership of nearly a quarter of a million, which dwarfed the rival socialdemocratic unions".[87]

Propaganda of the deed and illegalism

Italian American anarchist Luigi Galleani whose followers, known as Galleanists, carried out a series of bombings and assassination attempts from 1914 to 1932 in what they saw as attacks on "tyrants" and "enemies of the people"

Some anarchists, such as Johann Most, advocated publicising violent acts of retaliation against counter-revolutionaries because "we preach not only action in and for itself, but also action as propaganda".[101] Scholars such as Beverly Gage contend that this was not advocacy of mass murder, but targeted killings of members of the ruling class at times when such actions might garner sympathy from the population, such as during periods of heightened government repression or labor conflicts where workers were killed.[102] However, Most himself once boasted that "the existing system will be quickest and most radically overthrown by the annihilation of its exponents. Therefore, massacres of the enemies of the people must be set in motion".[103] Most is best known for a pamphlet published in 1885, The Science of Revolutionary Warfare, a how-to manual on the subject of making explosives based on knowledge he acquired while working at an explosives plant in New Jersey.[104]

By the 1880s, people inside and outside the anarchist movement began to use the slogan, "propaganda of the deed" to refer to individual bombings, regicides and tyrannicides. From 1905 onwards, the Russian counterparts of these anti-syndicalist anarchist-communists become partisans of economic terrorism and illegal "expropriations".[105]Illegalism as a practice emerged and within it "[t]he acts of the anarchist bombers and assassins ("propaganda by the deed") and the anarchist burglars ("individual reappropriation") expressed their desperation and their personal, violent rejection of an intolerable society. Moreover, they were clearly meant to be exemplary invitations to revolt".[106] France's Bonnot Gang was the most famous group to embrace illegalism.

However, important figures in the anarchist movement distanced themselves from such individual acts as soon as 1887. Peter Kropotkin thus wrote that year in Le Révolté that "a structure based on centuries of history cannot be destroyed with a few kilos of dynamite".[107] A variety of anarchists advocated the abandonment of these sorts of tactics in favour of collective revolutionary action, for example through the trade union movement. The anarcho-syndicalist Fernand Pelloutier argued in 1895 for renewed anarchist involvement in the labour movement on the basis that anarchism could do very well without "the individual dynamiter".[108]

State repression (including the infamous 1894 French lois scélérates) of the anarchist and labour movements following the few successful bombings and assassinations may have contributed in the first place to the abandonment of these kinds of tactics, although reciprocally state repression may have played a role in these isolated acts. The dismemberment of the French socialist movement into many groups and—following the suppression of the 1871—Paris Commune the execution and exile of many communards to penal colonies favoured individualist political expression and acts.[109]

Anarchists participated alongside the Bolsheviks in both February and October revolutions and were initially enthusiastic about the Bolshevik revolution.[112] However, following a political falling out with the Bolsheviks by the anarchists and other left-wing opposition the conflict culminated in the 1921 Kronstadt rebellion, which the new government repressed. Anarchists in central Russia were either imprisoned, driven underground or joined the victorious Bolsheviks; the anarchists from Petrograd and Moscow fled to Ukraine.[113] In the Free Territory, they fought in the civil war against the Whites (a grouping of monarchists and other opponents of the October Revolution) and then the Bolsheviks as part of the Revolutionary Insurrectionary Army of Ukraine led by Nestor Makhno, who established an anarchist society in the region for a number of months.

Expelled American anarchists Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman were among those agitating in response to Bolshevik policy and the suppression of the Kronstadt uprising, before they left Russia. Both wrote accounts of their experiences in Russia, criticising the amount of control the Bolsheviks exercised. For them, Bakunin's predictions about the consequences of Marxist rule that the rulers of the new "socialist" Marxist state would become a new elite had proved all too true.[85][114]

The victory of the Bolsheviks in the October Revolution and the resulting Russian Civil War did serious damage to anarchist movements internationally. Many workers and activists saw Bolshevik success as setting an example and communist parties grew at the expense of anarchism and other socialist movements. In France and the United States, for example, members of the major syndicalist movements of the General Confederation of Labour and Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) left the organisations and joined the Communist International.[115]

Conflicts with European fascist regimes

In the 1920s and 1930s, the rise of fascism in Europe transformed anarchism's conflict with the state. Italy saw the first struggles between anarchists and Benito Mussolini's fascists. Italian anarchists played a key role in the anti-fascist organisation Arditi del Popolo, which was strongest in areas with anarchist traditions and achieved some success in their activism, such as repelling Blackshirts in the anarchist stronghold of Parma in August 1922.[123] The veteran Italian anarchist Luigi Fabbri was one of the first critical theorists of fascism, describing it as "the preventive counter-revolution".[44] In France, where the far-right leagues came close to insurrection in the February 1934 riots, anarchists divided over a united front policy.[124]

Spanish Revolution

In Spain, the national anarcho-syndicalist trade union CNT initially refused to join a popular front electoral alliance and abstention by CNT supporters led to a right-wing election victory. In 1936, the CNT changed its policy and anarchist votes helped bring the popular front back to power. Months later, conservative members of the military, with the support of minority extreme-right parties, responded with an attempted coup, causing the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939).[128] In response to the army rebellion, an anarchist-inspired movement of peasants and workers, supported by armed militias, took control of Barcelona and of large areas of rural Spain where they collectivised the land.[129] However, the anarchists were losing ground even before the fascist victory in 1939 in a bitter struggle with the Stalinists, who controlled much of the distribution of military aid to the Republicans cause from the Soviet Union. According to Noam Chomsky, "the communists were mainly responsible for the destruction of the Spanish anarchists. Not just in Catalonia—the communist armies mainly destroyed the collectives elsewhere. The communists basically acted as the police force of the security system of the Republic and were very much opposed to the anarchists, partially because Stalin still hoped at that time to have some kind of pact with Western countries against Adolf Hitler. That failed and Stalin withdrew the support to the Republic. They even withdrew the Spanish gold reserves".[130] The events known as the Spanish Revolution was a workers' social revolution that began during the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936 and resulted in the widespread implementation of anarchist and more broadly libertarian socialist organisational principles throughout various portions of the country for two to three years, primarily Catalonia, Aragon, Andalusia and parts of Levante. Much of Spain's economy was put under worker control and in anarchist strongholds like Catalonia the figure was as high as 75%, but lower in areas with heavy Communist Party of Spain influence as the Soviet-allied party actively resisted attempts at collectivisation enactment. Factories were run through worker committees, agrarian areas became collectivised and run as libertarian communes. Anarchist historian Sam Dolgoff estimated that about eight million people participated directly or at least indirectly in the Spanish Revolution,[131] which he claimed "came closer to realising the ideal of the free stateless society on a vast scale than any other revolution in history".[132] Spanish Communist Party-led troops suppressed the collectives and persecuted both dissident Marxists and anarchists.[133] The prominent Italian anarchist Camillo Berneri, who volunteered to fight against Francisco Franco was killed instead in Spain by gunmen associated with the Spanish Communist Party.[134][135][136] The city of Madrid was turned over to the Francoist forces by the last non-francoist mayor of the city, the anarchist Melchor Rodríguez García.[137]

Post-war years

Anarchism sought to reorganise itself after the war and in this context the organisational debate between synthesis anarchism and platformism took importance once again especially in the anarchist movements of Italy and France. The Mexican Anarchist Federation was established in 1945 after the Anarchist Federation of the Centre united with the Anarchist Federation of the Federal District.[138] In the early 1940s, the Antifascist International Solidarity and the Federation of Anarchist Groups of Cuba merged into the large national organisation Asociación Libertaria de Cuba (Cuban Libertarian Association).[139] From 1944 to 1947, the Bulgarian Anarchist Communist Federation reemerged as part of a factory and workplace committee movement, but was repressed by the new Communist regime.[140] In 1945 in France the Fédération Anarchiste and the anarchosyndicalist trade union Confédération nationale du travail was established in the next year while the also synthesistFederazione Anarchica Italiana was founded in Italy. Korean anarchists formed the League of Free Social Constructors in September 1945[140] and in 1946 the Japanese Anarchist Federation was founded.[141] An International Anarchist Congress with delegates from across Europe was held in Paris in May 1948.[140] After World War II, an appeal in the Fraye Arbeter Shtime detailing the plight of German anarchists and called for Americans to support them. By February 1946, the sending of aid parcels to anarchists in Germany was a large-scale operation. The Federation of Libertarian Socialists was founded in Germany in 1947 and Rudolf Rocker wrote for its organ, Die Freie Gesellschaft, which survived until 1953.[142] In 1956, the Uruguayan Anarchist Federation was founded.[143] In 1955, the Anarcho-Communist Federation of Argentina renamed itself as the Argentine Libertarian Federation. The Syndicalist Workers' Federation (SWF) was a syndicalist group in active in post-war Britain,[144] and one of Solidarity Federation's earliest predecessors. It was formed in 1950 by members of the dissolved Anarchist Federation of Britain (AFB).[144] Unlike the AFB, which was influenced by anarcho-syndicalist ideas but ultimately not syndicalist itself, the SWF decided to pursue a more definitely syndicalist, worker-centred strategy from the outset.[144]

Contemporary anarchism

The famous okupassquat near Parc Güell, overlooking Barcelona (on the roof: "Occupy and Resist"), since squatting was a prominent part of the emergence of renewed anarchist movement from the counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s

In the United Kingdom in the 1970s, this was associated with the punk rock movement as exemplified by bands such as Crass and the Sex Pistols.[159] The housing and employment crisis in most of Western Europe led to the formation of communes and squatter movements like that of Barcelona, Spain. In Denmark, squatters occupied a disused military base and declared the Freetown Christiania, an autonomous haven in central Copenhagen. Since the revival of anarchism in the mid-20th century,[160] a number of new movements and schools of thought emerged. Although feminist tendencies have always been a part of the anarchist movement in the form of anarcha-feminism, they returned with vigour during the second wave of feminism in the 1960s. Anarchist anthropologist David Graeber and anarchist historian Andrej Grubacic have posited a rupture between generations of anarchism, with those "who often still have not shaken the sectarian habits" of the 19th century contrasted with the younger activists who are "much more informed, among other elements, by indigenous, feminist, ecological and cultural-critical ideas" and who by the turn of the 21st century formed "by far the majority" of anarchists.[161][162]

Since the 1980s, anarchism has grown into a strong political force in Latin America, with the development of Fejuve (1979),[163]CIPO-RFM (1980s),[164]Zapatistas (1994),[165]Horizontilidad (2001)[166] and the Oaxaca Uprising (2006).[167] Around the turn of the 21st century, anarchism grew in popularity and influence as part of the anti-war, anti-capitalist, and anti-globalisation movements.[168] Anarchists became known for their involvement in protests against the meetings of the World Trade Organization (WTO), Group of Eight (G8) and the World Economic Forum (WEF). Some anarchist factions at these protests engaged in rioting, property destruction, and violent confrontations with police. These actions were precipitated by ad hoc, leaderless, anonymous cadres known as black blocs—other organisational tactics pioneered in this time include security culture, affinity groups and the use of decentralised technologies such as the internet.[168] A significant event of this period was the confrontations at WTO conference in Seattle in 1999.[168] According to anarchist scholar Simon Critchley, "contemporary anarchism can be seen as a powerful critique of the pseudo-libertarianism of contemporary neo-liberalism [...] One might say that contemporary anarchism is about responsibility, whether sexual, ecological or socio-economic; it flows from an experience of conscience about the manifold ways in which the West ravages the rest; it is an ethical outrage at the yawning inequality, impoverishment and disenfranchisment that is so palpable locally and globally".[169]

Rojava is supporting efforts for workers to form cooperatives, such as this sewing cooperative

Anarchist schools of thought

Anarchist schools of thought had been generally grouped in two main historical traditions, individualist anarchism and social anarchism, which have some different origins, values and evolution.[12][22][173][174] The individualist wing of anarchism emphasises negative liberty, i.e. opposition to state or social control over the individual, while those in the social wing emphasise positive liberty to achieve one's potential and argue that humans have needs that society ought to fulfil, "recognising equality of entitlement".[175] In a chronological and theoretical sense, there are classical—those created throughout the 19th century—and post-classical anarchist schools—those created since the mid-20th century and after.

Beyond the specific factions of anarchist thought is philosophical anarchism, which embodies the theoretical stance that the state lacks moral legitimacy without accepting the imperative of revolution to eliminate it. A component especially of individualist anarchism[176][177] philosophical anarchism may accept the existence of a minimal state as unfortunate, and usually temporary, "necessary evil" but argue that citizens do not have a moral obligation to obey the state when its laws conflict with individual autonomy.[178] One reaction against sectarianism within the anarchist milieu was "anarchism without adjectives", a call for toleration first adopted by Fernando Tarrida del Mármol in 1889 in response to the "bitter debates" of anarchist theory at the time.[179] In abandoning the hyphenated anarchisms (i.e. collectivist-, communist-, mutualist– and individualist-anarchism), it sought to emphasise the anti-authoritarian beliefs common to all anarchist schools of thought.[180]

Mutualism

Mutualism began in 18th-century English and French labour movements before taking an anarchist form associated with Pierre-Joseph Proudhon in France and others in the United States.[181] Proudhon proposed spontaneous order, whereby organisation emerges without central authority, a "positive anarchy" where order arises when everybody does "what he wishes and only what he wishes"[182] and where "business transactions alone produce the social order."[183] Proudhon distinguished between ideal political possibilities and practical governance. For this reason, much in contrast to some of his theoretical statements concerning ultimate spontaneous self-governance, Proudhon was heavily involved in French parliamentary politics and allied himself not with anarchist but socialist factions of workers' movements and, in addition to advocating state-protected charters for worker-owned cooperatives, promoted certain nationalisation schemes during his life of public service.

Mutualist anarchism is concerned with reciprocity, free association, voluntary contract, federation, and credit and currency reform. According to the American mutualist William Batchelder Greene, each worker in the mutualist system would receive "just and exact pay for his work; services equivalent in cost being exchangeable for services equivalent in cost, without profit or discount".[184] Mutualism has been retrospectively characterised as ideologically situated between individualist and collectivist forms of anarchism.[185] Proudhon first characterised his goal as a "third form of society, the synthesis of communism and property".[186]

Social anarchism

Social anarchism calls for a system with common ownership of means of production and democratic control of all organisations, without any government authority or coercion. It is the largest school of thought in anarchism.[187] Social anarchism rejects private property, seeing it as a source of social inequality (while retaining respect for personal property)[188] and emphasises cooperation and mutual aid.[189]

Collectivist anarchism

Collectivist anarchism, also referred to as revolutionary socialism or a form of such,[190][191] is a revolutionary form of anarchism, commonly associated with Mikhail Bakunin and Johann Most.[192][193] Collectivist anarchists oppose all private ownership of the means of production, instead advocating that ownership be collectivised. This was to be achieved through violent revolution, first starting with a small cohesive group through acts of violence, or propaganda by the deed, which would inspire the workers as a whole to revolt and forcibly collectivise the means of production.[192]

However, collectivisation was not to be extended to the distribution of income as workers would be paid according to time worked, rather than receiving goods being distributed "according to need" as in anarcho-communism. This position was criticised by anarchist communists as effectively "uphold[ing] the wages system".[194] Collectivist anarchism arose contemporaneously with Marxism, but opposed the Marxist dictatorship of the proletariat despite the stated Marxist goal of a collectivist stateless society.[195] Anarchist, communist and collectivist ideas are not mutually exclusive—although the collectivist anarchists advocated compensation for labour, some held out the possibility of a post-revolutionary transition to a communist system of distribution according to need.[196]

Some forms of anarchist communism such as insurrectionary anarchism are strongly influenced by egoism and radical individualism, believing anarcho-communism is the best social system for the realisation of individual freedom.[205][206][207][208] Most anarcho-communists view anarcho-communism as a way of reconciling the opposition between the individual and society.[209][210][211]

Anarcho-communism developed out of radical socialist currents after the French Revolution[212][213] but was first formulated as such in the Italian section of the First International.[214] The theoretical work of Peter Kropotkin took importance later as it expanded and developed pro-organisationalist and insurrectionary anti-organisationalist sections.[215] To date, the best known examples of an anarchist communist society (i.e. established around the ideas as they exist today and achieving worldwide attention and knowledge in the historical canon), are the anarchist territories during the Spanish Revolution[216] and the Free Territory during the Russian Revolution. Through the efforts and influence of the Spanish anarchists during the Spanish Revolution within the Spanish Civil War, starting in 1936 anarchist communism existed in most of Aragon, parts of the Levante and Andalusia as well as in the stronghold of anarchist Catalonia before being crushed by the combined forces of the regime that won the war, Hitler, Mussolini, Communist Party of Spain repression (backed by the Soviet Union) as well as economic and armaments blockades from the capitalist countries and the Spanish Republic itself.[217] During the Russian Revolution, anarchists such as Nestor Makhno worked to create and defend—through the Revolutionary Insurrectionary Army of Ukraine—anarcho-communism in the Free Territory of the Ukraine from 1919 before being conquered by the Bolsheviks in 1921.

Anarcho-syndicalism

Anarcho-syndicalism is a branch of anarchism that focuses on the labour movement.[218] Anarcho-syndicalists view labour unions as a potential force for revolutionary social change, replacing capitalism and the state with a new society democratically self-managed by workers. The basic principles of anarcho-syndicalism are workers' solidarity, direct action and workers' self-management. Anarcho-syndicalists believe that only direct action—that is, action concentrated on directly attaining a goal as opposed to indirect action, such as electing a representative to a government position—will allow workers to liberate themselves.[219] Moreover, anarcho-syndicalists believe that workers' organisations (the organisations that struggle against the wage system, which in anarcho-syndicalist theory will eventually form the basis of a new society) should be self-managing. They should not have bosses or "business agents"—rather, the workers should be able to make all the decisions that affect them themselves. Rudolf Rocker was one of the most popular voices in the anarcho-syndicalist movement. He outlined a view of the origins of the movement, what it sought and why it was important to the future of labour in his 1938 pamphlet Anarcho-Syndicalism. The International Workers Association is an international anarcho-syndicalist federation of various labour unions from different countries. The Spanish CNT played and still plays a major role in the Spanish labour movement. It was also an important force in the Spanish Civil War.

Individualist anarchism

Individualist anarchism refers to several traditions of thought within the anarchist movement that emphasise the individual and their will over any kinds of external determinants such as groups, society, traditions and ideological systems.[220][221] Individualist anarchism is not a single philosophy, but it instead refers to a group of individualistic philosophies that sometimes are in conflict.

In 1793, William Godwin, who has often[61] been cited as the first anarchist, wrote Political Justice, which some consider the first expression of anarchism.[62][64] Godwin was a philosophical anarchist and from a rationalist and utilitarian basis opposed revolutionary action and saw a minimal state as a present "necessary evil" that would become increasingly irrelevant and powerless by the gradual spread of knowledge.[62][222] Godwin advocated individualism, proposing that all cooperation in labour be eliminated on the premise that this would be most conducive with the general good.[223][224]

An influential form of individualist anarchism, called "egoism",[225] or egoist anarchism, was expounded by one of the earliest and best-known proponents of individualist anarchism, the German Max Stirner.[71] Stirner's The Ego and Its Own, published in 1844, is a founding text of the philosophy.[71] According to Stirner, the only limitation on the rights of individuals is their power to obtain what they desire,[226] without regard for God, state, or morality.[227] To Stirner, rights were "spooks" in the mind and he held that society does not exist, but "the individuals are its reality".[228] Stirner advocated self-assertion and foresaw unions of egoists, non-systematic associations continually renewed by all parties' support through an act of will,[229] which Stirner proposed as a form of organisation in place of the state.[230] Egoist anarchists argue that egoism will foster genuine and spontaneous union between individuals.[231] "Egoism" has inspired many interpretations of Stirner's philosophy. It was re-discovered and promoted by German philosophical anarchist and homosexual activist John Henry Mackay.

Josiah Warren is widely regarded as the first American anarchist,[232] and the four-page weekly paper he edited during 1833, The Peaceful Revolutionist, was the first anarchist periodical published.[233] For American anarchist historian Eunice Minette Schuster, "[i]t is apparent [...] that Proudhonian Anarchism was to be found in the United States at least as early as 1848 and that it was not conscious of its affinity to the Individualist Anarchism of Josiah Warren and Stephen Pearl Andrews [...] William B. Greene presented this Proudhonian Mutualism in its purest and most systematic form".[234]Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) was an important early influence in individualist anarchist thought in the United States and Europe. Thoreau was an American author, poet, naturalist, tax resister, development critic, surveyor, historian, philosopher and leading transcendentalist. He is best known for his books Walden, a reflection upon simple living in natural surroundings, as well as his essay, Civil Disobedience, an argument for individual resistance to civil government in moral opposition to an unjust state. Benjamin Tucker later fused Stirner's egoism with the economics of Warren and Proudhon in his eclectic influential publication Liberty.

Anarchism continues to generate many philosophies and movements, at times eclectic, drawing upon various sources and syncretic, combining disparate concepts to create new philosophical approaches.[243]

Insurrectionary anarchism is a revolutionary theory, practice, and tendency within the anarchist movement which emphasises insurrection within anarchist practice.[244][245] It is critical of formal organisations such as labour unions and federations that are based on a political programme and periodic congresses.[244] Instead, insurrectionary anarchists advocate informal organisation and small affinity group based organisation.[244][245] Insurrectionary anarchists put value in attack, permanent class conflict and a refusal to negotiate or compromise with class enemies.[244][245]

Green anarchism (or eco-anarchism)[246] is a school of thought within anarchism that emphasises environmental issues,[247] with an important precedent in anarcho-naturism[237][248][249] and whose main contemporary currents are anarcho-primitivism and social ecology. Writing from a green anarchist perspective, John Zerzan attributes the ills of today's social degradation to technology and the birth of agricultural civilization.[250] While Layla AbdelRahim argues that "the shift in human consciousness was also a shift in human subsistence strategies, whereby some human animals reinvented their narrative to center murder and predation and thereby institutionalize violence".[251] Thus, according to her, civilization was the result of the human development of technologies and grammar for predatory economics. Language and literacy, she claims, are some of these technologies.[252][253]

Anarcha-feminism (also called anarchist feminism and anarcho-feminism) combines anarchism with feminism. It generally views patriarchy as a manifestation of involuntary coercive hierarchy that should be replaced by decentralised free association. Anarcha-feminists believe that the struggle against patriarchy is an essential part of class struggle, and the anarchist struggle against the state. In essence, the philosophy sees anarchist struggle as a necessary component of feminist struggle and vice versa. L. Susan Brown claims that "as anarchism is a political philosophy that opposes all relationships of power, it is inherently feminist".[254] Anarcha-feminism began with the late 19th-century writings of early feminist anarchists such as Emma Goldman and Voltairine de Cleyre.

Religious anarchism refers to a set of related anarchist ideologies that are inspired by the teachings of (organized) religions, but many anarchists have traditionally been skeptical of and opposed to organized religion. Many different religions have served as inspiration for religious forms of anarchism, most notably Christianity as Christian anarchists believe that biblical teachings give credence to anarchist philosophy. Non-Christian forms of religious anarchism include Buddhist anarchism, Jewish anarchism and most recently Neopaganism

Platformism is a tendency within the wider anarchist movement based on the organisational theories in the tradition of Dielo Truda's Organisational Platform of the General Union of Anarchists (Draft).[121] The document was based on the experiences of Russian anarchists in the 1917 October Revolution, which led eventually to the victory of the Bolsheviks over the anarchists and other groups. The Platform attempted to address and explain the anarchist movement's failures during the Russian Revolution.

Post-left anarchy is a recent current in anarchist thought that promotes a critique of anarchism's relationship to traditional left-wing politics. Some post-leftists seek to escape the confines of ideology in general also presenting a critique of organisations and morality.[259] Influenced by the work of Max Stirner[259] and by the Marxist Situationist International,[259] post-left anarchy is marked by a focus on social insurrection and a rejection of leftist social organisation.[260]

Left-wing market anarchism strongly affirm the classical liberal ideas of self-ownership and free markets while maintaining that taken to their logical conclusions, these ideas support strongly anti-corporatist, anti-hierarchical, pro-labour positions and anti-capitalism in economics and anti-imperialism in foreign policy.[261][262][263]

Anarcho-transhumanism is a recently new branch of anarchism that takes traditional and modern anarchism, typically drawing from anarcho-syndicalism, left-libertarianism or libertarian soclialism and combines it with transhumanism and post-humanism. It can be described as a "liberal democratic revolution, at its core the idea that people are happiest when they have rational control over their lives. Reason, science, and technology provide one kind of control, slowly freeing us from ignorance, toil, pain, disease and limited lifespans (aging)". Some anarcho-transhumanists might also follow technogaianism.

An important current within anarchism is free love.[282] Free love advocates sometimes traced their roots back to Josiah Warren and to experimental communities, viewed sexual freedom as a clear, direct expression of an individual's sovereignty. Free love particularly stressed women's rights since most sexual laws discriminated against women, see for example marriage laws and anti-birth control measures.[236] The most important American free love journal was Lucifer the Lightbearer (1883–1907), edited by Moses Harman and Lois Waisbrooker,[283] but also there existed Ezra Heywood and Angela Heywood's The Word (1872–1890, 1892–1893).[236]Free Society (1895–1897 as The Firebrand; 1897–1904 as Free Society) was a major anarchist newspaper in the United States at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries.[284] The publication advocated free love and women's rights and critiqued "Comstockery"—i.e. censorship of sexual information. Also M. E. Lazarus was an important American individualist anarchist who promoted free love.[236]

In New York City's Greenwich Village, bohemian feminists and socialists advocated self-realisation and pleasure for women (and also men) in the here and now. They encouraged playing with sexual roles and sexuality[285] and the openly bisexual radical Edna St. Vincent Millay and the lesbian anarchist Margaret Anderson were prominent among them. Discussion groups organised by the Villagers were frequented by Emma Goldman, among others. Magnus Hirschfeld noted in 1923 that Goldman "has campaigned boldly and steadfastly for individual rights, and especially for those deprived of their rights. Thus it came about that she was the first and only woman, indeed the first and only American, to take up the defence of homosexual love before the general public".[286] Before Goldman, heterosexual anarchist Robert Reitzel (1849–1898) spoke positively of homosexuality from the beginning of the 1890s in his Detroit-based German language journal Der arme Teufel (English: The Poor Devil). In Argentina, anarcha-feminist Virginia Bolten published the newspaper called La Voz de la Mujer (English: The Woman's Voice), which was published nine times in Rosario between 8 January 1896 and 1 January 1897 and was revived briefly in 1901.[287]

In Europe, the main propagandist of free love within individualist anarchism was Emile Armand.[288] He proposed the concept of la camaraderie amoureuse to speak of free love as the possibility of voluntary sexual encounter between consenting adults. He was also a consistent proponent of polyamory.[288] In Germany, the Stirnerists Adolf Brand and John Henry Mackay were pioneering campaigners for the acceptance of male bisexuality and homosexuality. Mujeres Libres was an anarchist women's organisation in Spain that aimed to empower working class women. It was founded in 1936 by Lucía Sánchez Saornil, Mercedes Comaposada and Amparo Poch y Gascón and had approximately 30,000 members. The organisation was based on the idea of a "double struggle" for women's liberation and social revolution and argued that the two objectives were equally important and should be pursued in parallel. In order to gain mutual support, they created networks of women anarchists.[289] Lucía Sánchez Saornil was a main founder of the Spanish anarcha-feminist federation Mujeres Libres who was open about her lesbianism.[290] She was published in a variety of literary journals while working under a male pen name, she was able to explore lesbian themes[291] at a time when homosexuality was criminalised and subject to censorship and punishment.

More recently, the British anarcho-pacifist Alex Comfort gained notoriety during the sexual revolution for writing the bestseller sex manual The Joy of Sex. The issue of free love has a dedicated treatment in the work of French anarcho-hedonist philosopher Michel Onfray in such works as Théorie du corps amoureux. Pour une érotique solaire (2000) and L'invention du plaisir. Fragments cyréaniques (2002).

Libertarian education and freethought

For English anarchist William Godwin, education was "the main means by which change would be achieved".[292] Godwin saw that the main goal of education should be the promotion of happiness.[292] For Godwin, education had to have a "respect for the child's autonomy which precluded any form of coercion", a "pedagogy that respected this and sought to build on the child's own motivation and initiatives" and a "concern about the child's capacity to resist an ideology transmitted through the school".[292] In his Political Justice, he criticises state sponsored schooling "on account of its obvious alliance with national government".[293] Early American anarchist Josiah Warren advanced alternative education experiences in the libertarian communities he established.[294] Max Stirner wrote in 1842 a long essay on education called The False Principle of our Education in which Stirner names his educational principle "personalist", explaining that self-understanding consists in hourly self-creation. Education for him is to create "free men, sovereign characters", by which he means "eternal characters [...] who are therefore eternal because they form themselves each moment".[295]

In the United States, freethought was a basically anti-Christian, anti-clerical movement, whose purpose was to make the individual politically and spiritually free to decide for himself on religious matters. A number of contributors to Liberty (anarchist publication) were prominent figures in both freethought and anarchism. The individualist anarchist George MacDonald was a co-editor of Freethought and, for a time, The Truth Seeker. E.C. Walker was co-editor of Lucifer, the Light-Bearer[240] and many anarchists were "ardent freethinkers; reprints from freethought papers such as Lucifer, the Light-Bearer, Freethought and The Truth Seeker appeared in Liberty... The church was viewed as a common ally of the state and as a repressive force in and of itself".[240]

In 1901, Catalan anarchist and free thinker Francesc Ferrer i Guàrdia established "modern" or progressive schools in Barcelona in defiance of an educational system controlled by the Catholic Church.[296] The schools' stated goal was to "educate the working class in a rational, secular and non-coercive setting". Fiercely anti-clerical, Ferrer believed in "freedom in education", education free from the authority of church and state.[297] Murray Bookchin wrote: "This period [1890s] was the heyday of libertarian schools and pedagogical projects in all areas of the country where Anarchists exercised some degree of influence. Perhaps the best-known effort in this field was Francisco Ferrer's Modern School (Escuela Moderna), a project which exercised a considerable influence on Catalan education and on experimental techniques of teaching generally".[298] La Escuela Moderna and Ferrer's ideas generally formed the inspiration for a series of Modern Schools in the United States,[296] Cuba, South America and London. The first of these was started in New York City in 1911. It also inspired the Italian newspaper Università popolare, founded in 1901. Russian christian anarchist Leo Tolstoy established a school for peasant children on his estate.[299] Tolstoy's educational experiments were short-lived due to harassment by the Tsarist secret police.[300] Tolstoy established a conceptual difference between education and culture.[299] He thought that "[e]ducation is the tendency of one man to make another just like himself [...] Education is culture under restraint, culture is free. [Education is] when the teaching is forced upon the pupil, and when then instruction is exclusive, that is when only those subjects are taught which the educator regards as necessary".[299] For him, "without compulsion, education was transformed into culture".[299]

A more recent libertarian tradition on education is that of unschooling and the free school in which child-led activity replaces pedagogic approaches. Experiments in Germany led to A. S. Neill founding what became Summerhill School in 1921.[301] Summerhill is often cited as an example of anarchism in practice.[302][303] However, although Summerhill and other free schools are radically libertarian, they differ in principle from those of Ferrer by not advocating an overtly political class struggle-approach.[304] In addition to organising schools according to libertarian principles, anarchists have also questioned the concept of schooling per se. The term deschooling was popularised by Ivan Illich, who argued that the school as an institution is dysfunctional for self-determined learning and serves the creation of a consumer society instead.[305]

^George Woodcock. "Anarchism". The Encyclopedia of Philosophy. ANARCHISM, a social philosophy that rejects authoritarian government and maintains that voluntary institutions are best suited to express man's natural social tendencies.

^"That is why Anarchy, when it works to destroy authority in all its aspects, when it demands the abrogation of laws and the abolition of the mechanism that serves to impose them, when it refuses all hierarchical organization and preaches free agreement — at the same time strives to maintain and enlarge the precious kernel of social customs without which no human or animal society can exist." Peter Kropotkin. Anarchism: its philosophy and ideal

^"In a word, we reject all legislation, all authority, and all privileged, licensed, official, and legal influence, even though arising from universal suffrage, convinced that it can turn only to the advantage of a dominant minority of exploiters against the interests of the immense majority in subjection to them. This is the sense in which we are really Anarchists."God and the State by Mikhail Bakunin.

^"In practice, any individual who, because of his or her temperament or because of conscious and serious reflection, repudiates all external authority or coercion, whether of a governmental, ethical, intellectual, or economic order, can be considered an anarchist. Everyone who consciously rejects the domination of people by other people or by the social ambiance, and its economic corollaries, can be said to be an anarchist as well."Anarchist Individualism and Amorous Comradeship by Emile Armand

^Brooks, Frank H. (1994). The Individualist Anarchists: An Anthology of Liberty (1881–1908). Transaction Publishers. p. xi. ISBN1-56000-132-1. Usually considered to be an extreme left-wing ideology, anarchism has always included a significant strain of radical individualism, from the hyperrationalism of Godwin, to the egoism of Stirner, to the libertarians and anarcho-capitalists of today

^Joseph Kahn (2000). "Anarchism, the Creed That Won't Stay Dead; The Spread of World Capitalism Resurrects a Long-Dormant Movement". The New York Times (5 August).Colin Moynihan (2007). "Book Fair Unites Anarchists. In Spirit, Anyway". New York Times (16 April).

^"The anarchists were unanimous in subjecting authoritarian socialism to a barrage of severe criticism. At the time when they made violent and satirical attacks these were not entirely well founded, for those to whom they were addressed were either primitive or "vulgar" communists, whose thought had not yet been fertilized by Marxist humanism, or else, in the case of Marx and Engels themselves, were not as set on authority and state control as the anarchists made out." Daniel Guerin, Anarchism: From Theory to Practice (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1970).

Woodcock, George. Anarchism: A History of Libertarian Ideas and Movements. Broadview Press, 2004 (uses the terms interchangeably, such as on p. 10).

Skirda, Alexandre. Facing the Enemy: A History of Anarchist Organization from Proudhon to May 1968. AK Press 2002. p. 183.

Fernandez, Frank. Cuban Anarchism. The History of a Movement. See Sharp Press, 2001, p. 9.

^Morris, Christopher. 1992. An Essay on the Modern State. Cambridge University Press. p. 61. (Using "libertarian anarchism" synonymously with "individualist anarchism" when referring to individualist anarchism that supports a market society).

^"The priority of dao over tiannature:sky underwrites the themes of dependency and relativism that pervade the Zhuangzi and ultimately the skepticism, the open-minded toleration and the political anarchism (or disinterest in political activity or involvement)." "Taoism" at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

^"Doing nothing [wu wei] is the famous Daoist concept for natural action, action in accord with Dao, action in which we freely follow our own way and allow other beings to do likewise. Zhuangzi, the great anarchic Daoist sage, compared it to "riding on the wind." Max Cafard. "Zen Anarchy"

^"Zhuangzi helps us discover an anarchistic epistemology and sensibility. He describes a state in which "you are open to everything you see and hear, and allow this to act through you."[45] Part of wuwei, doing without doing, is "knowing without knowing," knowing as being open to the things known, rather than conquering and possessing the objects of knowledge. This means not imposing our prejudices (whether our own personal ones, our culture's, or those built into the human mind) on the Ten Thousand Things." Max Cafard. The Surre(gion)alist Manifesto and Other Writings

^"The next group of interpreters have also become incorporated into the extant version of the text. They are the school of anarchistically inclined philosophers, that Graham identifies as a "Primitivist" and a school of "Yangists," chapters 8 to 11, and 28 to 31. These thinkers appear to have been profoundly influenced by the Laozi, and also by the thought of the first and last of the Inner Chapters: "Wandering Beyond," and "Responding to Emperors and Kings." There are also possible signs of influence from Yang Zhu, whose concern was to protect and cultivate one's inner life-source. These chapters combine the anarchistic ideals of a simple life close to nature that can be found in the Laozi with the practices that lead to the cultivation and nurturing of life. " "Zhuangzi (Chuang-Tzu, 369–298 BCE)" at the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy

^Several historians of anarchism have gone so far as to classify La Botie's treatise itself as anarchist, which is incorrect since La Botie never extended his analysis from tyrannical government to government per se, but while La Botie cannot be considered an anarchist, his sweeping strictures on tyranny and the universality of his political philosophy lend themselves easily to such an expansion. Introduction to The Politics of Obedience: The Discourse of Voluntary Servitude by Murray Rothbard. Ludwig Von Mises Institute. p. 18.

^"Quite rightly, La Boëtie recognizes the potential for domination in any democracy: the democratic leader, elected by the people, becomes intoxicated with his own power and teeters increasingly towards tyranny. Indeed, we can see modern democracy itself as an instance of voluntary servitude on a mass scale. It is not so much that we participate in an illusion whereby we are deceived by elites into thinking we have a genuine say in decision-making. It is rather that democracy itself has encouraged a mass contentment with powerlessness and a general love of submission." "Voluntary Servitude Reconsidered: Radical Politics and the Problem of Self-Domination"Saul Newman.

^"Anarchists have regarded the secular revolt of the Diggers, or True Levellers, in seventeenth-century England led by Gerrard Winstanley as a source of pride. Winstanley, deeming that property is corrupting, opposed clericalism, political power and privilege. It is economic inequality, he believed, that produces crime and misery. He championed a primitive communalism based on the pure teachings of God as comprehended through reason." Kenneth C. Wenzer. "Godwin's Place in the Anarchist Tradition — a Bicentennial Tribute"

^"It was in these conditions of class struggle that, among a whole cluster of radical groups such as the Fifth Monarchy Men, the Levellers and the Ranters, there emerged perhaps the first real proto-anarchists, the Diggers, who like the classical 19th-century anarchists identified political and economic power and who believed that a social, rather than political revolution was necessary for the establishment of justice. Gerrard Winstanley, the Diggers' leader, made an identification with the word of God and the principle of reason, an equivalent philosophy to that found in Tolstoy's The Kingdom of God is Within You." Marlow. "Anarchism and Christianity"

^"Although Proudhon was the first writer to call himself an anarchist, at least two predecessors outlined systems that contain all the basic elements of anarchism. The first was Gerrard Winstanley (1609 – c. 1660), a linen draper who led the small movement of the Diggers during the Commonwealth. Winstanley and his followers protested in the name of a radical Christianity against the economic distress that followed the Civil War and against the inequality that the grandees of the New Model Army seemed intent on preserving. In 1649–1650 the Diggers squatted on stretches of common land in southern England and attempted to set up communities based on work on the land and the sharing of goods." George Woodcock Anarchism The Encyclopedia of Philosophy

^Godwin himself attributed the first anarchist writing to Edmund Burke's A Vindication of Natural Society. "Most of the above arguments may be found much more at large in Burke's Vindication of Natural Society; a treatise in which the evils of the existing political institutions are displayed with incomparable force of reasoning and lustre of eloquence ..." – footnote, Ch. 2 Political Justice by William Godwin.

"In March 1871 the Commune took power in the abandoned city and held it for two months. Then Versailles seized the moment to attack and, in one horrifying week, executed roughly 20,000 Communards or suspected sympathizers, a number higher than those killed in the recent war or during Robespierre's 'Terror' of 1793–1794. More than 7,500 were jailed or deported to places like New Caledonia. Thousands of others fled to Belgium, England, Italy, Spain and the United States. In 1872, stringent laws were passed that ruled out all possibilities of organising on the left. Not till 1880 was there a general amnesty for exiled and imprisoned Communards. Meanwhile, the Third Republic found itself strong enough to renew and reinforce Louis Napoleon's imperialist expansion – in Indochina, Africa, and Oceania. Many of France's leading intellectuals and artists had participated in the Commune (Courbet was its quasi-minister of culture, Rimbaud and Pissarro were active propagandists) or were sympathetic to it. The ferocious repression of 1871 and thereafter, was probably the key factor in alienating these milieux from the Third Republic and stirring their sympathy for its victims at home and abroad." Anderson, Benedict (July–August 2004). "In the World-Shadow of Bismarck and Nobel". New Left Review. New Left Review. II (28): 85–129. Archived from the original on 2015-12-19. Retrieved 2016-01-07.

According to some analysts, in post-war Germany, the prohibition of the Communist Party (KDP) and thus of institutional far-left political organization may also, in the same manner, have played a role in the creation of the Red Army Faction.

^Goldman, Emma (2003). "Preface". My Disillusionment in Russia. New York: Dover Publications. p. xx. ISBN0-486-43270-X. My critic further charged me with believing that "had the Russians made the Revolution à la Bakunin instead of à la Marx" the result would have been different and more satisfactory. I plead guilty to the charge. In truth, I not only believe so; I am certain of it.

^"The Munich Soviet (or "Council Republic") of 1919 exhibited certain features of the TAZ, even though — like most revolutions — its stated goals were not exactly "temporary." Gustav Landauer's participation as Minister of Culture along with Silvio Gesell as Minister of Economics and other anti-authoritarian and extreme libertarian socialists such as the poet/playwrights Erich Mühsam and Ernst Toller, and Ret Marut (the novelist B. Traven), gave the Soviet a distinct anarchist flavor." Hakim Bey. "T.A.Z.: The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism"

^"When clashes with the Communist Party broke out, his house, where he lived with other anarchists, was attacked on 4 May 1937. They were all labelled "counter-revolutionaries", disarmed, deprived of their papers and forbidden to go out into the street. There was still shooting in the streets when, on 5 May 1937, news arrived from Italy of Antonio Gramsci's death in a fascist prison...Leaving Radio Barcelona, Berneri set off for the Plaça de la Generalitat, where some Stalinists shouted after him. Before he could turn and look, they opened fire with machine guns, and left his dead body there on the street.""Berneri, Luigi Camillo, 1897–1937" at libcom.com

^"Camillo Berneri". The Anarchist Encyclopedia: A Gallery of Saints & Sinners ... Archived from the original on 19 February 2006. Spain: Return to "normalization" in Barcelona. The Republican government had sent troops to take over the telephone exchange on 3 May, pitting the anarchists & Poumists on one side against the Republican government & the Stalinist Communist Party on the other, in pitched street battles, resulting in 500 anarchists killed. Squads of Communist Party members took to the streets on 6 May to assassinate leading anarchists. Today, among those found murdered, was the Italian anarchist Camillo Berneri"

^"The surviving sectors of the revolutionary anarchist movement of the 1920–1940 period, now working in the SIA and the FGAC, reinforced by those Cuban militants and Spanish anarchists fleeing now-fascist Spain, agreed at the beginning of the decade to hold an assembly with the purpose of regrouping the libertarian forces inside a single organization. The guarantees of the 1940 Constitution permitted them to legally create an organization of this type, and it was thus that they agreed to dissolve the two principal Cuban anarchist organizations, the SIA and FGAC, and create a new, unified group, the Asociación Libertaria de Cuba (ALC), a sizable organization with a membership in the thousands."Cuban Anarchism: The History of A Movement by Frank Fernandez

^Cage self-identified as an anarchist in a 1985 interview: "I'm an anarchist. I don't know whether the adjective is pure and simple, or philosophical, or what, but I don't like government! And I don't like institutions! And I don't have any confidence in even good institutions." John Cage at Seventy: An Interview by Stephen Montague. American Music, Summer 1985. Ubu.com. Accessed 24 May 2007.

^"It was in the black mirror of anarchism that surrealism first recognised itself," wrote André Breton in "The Black Mirror of Anarchism," Selection 23 in Robert Graham, ed., Anarchism: A Documentary History of Libertarian Ideas, Volume Two: The Emergence of the New Anarchism (1939–1977)"Archived copy". Archived from the original on 28 October 2010. Retrieved 5 March 2011.. Breton had returned to France in 1947 and in April of that year Andre Julien welcomed his return in the pages of Le Libertaire the weekly paper of the Federation Anarchiste ""1919–1950: The politics of Surrealism" by Nick Heath on libcom.org

^"In the forties and fifties, anarchism, in fact if not in name, began to reappear, often in alliance with pacifism, as the basis for a critique of militarism on both sides of the Cold War."Archived copy". Archived from the original on 2010-10-28. Retrieved 2011-03-05. The anarchist/pacifist wing of the peace movement was small in comparison with the wing of the movement that emphasized electoral work, but made an important contribution to the movement as a whole. Where the more conventional wing of the peace movement rejected militarism and war under all but the most dire circumstances, the anarchist/pacifist wing rejected these on principle.""Anarchism and the Anti-Globalization Movement" by Barbara Epstein

^"In the 1950s and 1960s anarcho-pacifism began to gel, tough-minded anarchists adding to the mixture their critique of the state, and tender-minded pacifists their critique of violence. Its first practical manifestation was at the level of method: nonviolent direct action, principled and pragmatic, was used widely in both the Civil Rights movement in the US and the campaign against nuclear weapons in Britain and elsewhere."Geoffrey Ostergaard. Resisting the Nation State. The pacifist and anarchist tradition

^Farrell provides a detailed history of the Catholic Workers and their founders Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin. He explains that their pacifism, anarchism, and commitment to the downtrodden were one of the important models and inspirations for the 1960s. As Farrell puts it, "Catholic Workers identified the issues of the sixties before the Sixties began, and they offered models of protest long before the protest decade.""The Spirit of the Sixties: The Making of Postwar Radicalism" by James J. Farrell

^"Within the movements of the sixties there was much more receptivity to anarchism-in-fact than had existed in the movements of the thirties ... But the movements of the sixties were driven by concerns that were more compatible with an expressive style of politics, with hostility to authority in general and state power in particular ... By the late sixties, political protest was intertwined with cultural radicalism based on a critique of all authority and all hierarchies of power. Anarchism circulated within the movement along with other radical ideologies. The influence of anarchism was strongest among radical feminists, in the commune movement, and probably in the Weather Underground and elsewhere in the violent fringe of the anti-war movement." "Anarchism and the Anti-Globalization Movement" by Barbara Epstein

^Esenwein, George Richard "Anarchist Ideology and the Working Class Movement in Spain, 1868–1898" [p. 135].

^"A member of a community," The Mutualist; this 1826 series criticised Robert Owen's proposals, and has been attributed to a dissident Owenite, possibly from the Friendly Association for Mutual Interests of Valley Forge; Shawn Wilburn, 2006, "More from the 1826 "Mutualist"?".

^Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph (1979). The Principle of Federation. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. ISBN0-8020-5458-7. The notion of anarchy in politics is just as rational and positive as any other. It means that once industrial functions have taken over from political functions, then business transactions alone produce the social order.

^"Communism versus Mutualism", Socialistic, Communistic, Mutualistic and Financial Fragments. (Boston: Lee & Shepard, 1875) William Batchelder Greene: "Under the mutual system, each individual will receive the just and exact pay for his work; services equivalent in cost being exchangeable for services equivalent in cost, without profit or discount; and so much as the individual laborer will then get over and above what he has earned will come to him as his share in the general prosperity of the community of which he is an individual member."

^"This does not mean that the majority thread within the anarchist movement is uncritical of individualist anarchism. Far from it! Social anarchists have argued that this influence of non-anarchist ideas means that while its "criticism of the State is very searching, and [its] defence of the rights of the individual very powerful," like Spencer it "opens ... the way for reconstituting under the heading of 'defence' all the functions of the State." Section G – Is individualist anarchism capitalistic?An Anarchist FAQ

^ ab"The revolution abolishes private ownership of the means of production and distribution, and with it goes capitalistic business. Personal possession remains only in the things you use. Thus, your watch is your own, but the watch factory belongs to the people."Alexander Berkman. "What Is Communist Anarchism?"

^Bakunin, Mikhail (1990). Statism and Anarchy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN0-521-36182-6. They [the Marxists] maintain that only a dictatorship – their dictatorship, of course – can create the will of the people, while our answer to this is: No dictatorship can have any other aim but that of self-perpetuation, and it can beget only slavery in the people tolerating it; freedom can be created only by freedom, that is, by a universal rebellion on the part of the people and free organization of the toiling masses from the bottom up.

^Post-left anarcho-communist Bob Black after analysing insurrectionary anarcho-communist Luigi Galleani's view on anarcho-communism went as far as saying that "communism is the final fulfillment of individualism ... The apparent contradiction between individualism and communism rests on a misunderstanding of both ... Subjectivity is also objective: the individual really is subjective. It is nonsense to speak of "emphatically prioritizing the social over the individual,"... You may as well speak of prioritizing the chicken over the egg. Anarchy is a "method of individualization." It aims to combine the greatest individual development with the greatest communal unity."Bob Black. Nightmares of Reason.

^"Modern Communists are more individualistic than Stirner. To them, not merely religion, morality, family and State are spooks, but property also is no more than a spook, in whose name the individual is enslaved – and how enslaved! ... Communism thus creates a basis for the liberty and Eigenheit of the individual. I am a Communist because I am an Individualist. Fully as heartily the Communists concur with Stirner when he puts the word take in place of demand – that leads to the dissolution of property, to expropriation. Individualism and Communism go hand in hand."[3]Max Baginski. "Stirner: The Ego and His Own" on Mother Earth. Vol. 2. No. 3 May 1907

^Peter Kropotkin. Communism and Anarchy. Retrieved 26 July 2011. Communism is the one which guarantees the greatest amount of individual liberty – provided that the idea that begets the community be Liberty, Anarchy ... Communism guarantees economic freedom better than any other form of association, because it can guarantee wellbeing, even luxury, in return for a few hours of work instead of a day's work.

^"I see the dichotomies made between individualism and communism, individual revolt and class struggle, the struggle against human exploitation and the exploitation of nature as false dichotomies and feel that those who accept them are impoverishing their own critique and struggle.""MY PERSPECTIVES" by Willful Disobedience Vol. 2, No. 12Archived 29 July 2011 at WebCite

^Bookchin, Murray. To Remember Spain: The Anarchist and Syndicalist Revolution of 1936. "This process of education and class organization, more than any single factor in Spain, produced the collectives. And to the degree that the CNT-FAI (for the two organizations became fatally coupled after July 1936) exercised the major influence in an area, the collectives proved to be generally more durable, communist and resistant to Stalinist counterrevolution than other republican-held areas of Spain."

^Ryner, Han. "Mini-Manual of Individualism". Archived from the original on 6 September 2008. What do I mean by individualism? I mean by individualism the moral doctrine which, relying on no dogma, no tradition, no external determination, appeals only to the individual conscience.

^"I do not admit anything except the existence of the individual, as a condition of his sovereignty. To say that the sovereignty of the individual is conditioned by Liberty is simply another way of saying that it is conditioned by itself.""Anarchism and the State" in Individual Liberty

^"But there has always been a market-oriented strand of libertarian socialism that emphasizes voluntary cooperation between producers. And markets, properly understood, have always been about cooperation. As a commenter at Reason magazine's Hit&Run blog, remarking on Jesse Walker's link to the Kelly article, put it: "every trade is a cooperative act." In fact, it's a fairly common observation among market anarchists that genuinely free markets have the most legitimate claim to the label 'socialism.'"."Socialism: A Perfectly Good Word Rehabilitated" by Kevin Carson at website of Center for a Stateless Society

^"In fact, few anarchists would accept the 'anarcho-capitalists' into the anarchist camp since they do not share a concern for economic equality and social justice, Their self-interested, calculating market men would be incapable of practising voluntary co-operation and mutual aid. Anarcho-capitalists, even if they do reject the State, might therefore best be called right-wing libertarians rather than anarchists." Peter Marshall. Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism. Harper Perennial. London. 2008. p. 565

^"It is important to distinguish between anarchism and certain strands of right-wing libertarianism which at times go by the same name (for example, Murray Rothbard's anarcho-capitalism)."Saul Newman, The Politics of Postanarchism, Edinburgh University Press, 2010, p. 43 ISBN0748634959

^"'Libertarian' and 'libertarianism' are frequently employed by anarchists as synonyms for 'anarchist' and 'anarchism', largely as an attempt to distance themselves from the negative connotations of 'anarchy' and its derivatives. The situation has been vastly complicated in recent decades with the rise of anarcho-capitalism, 'minimal statism' and an extreme right-wing laissez-faire philosophy advocated by such theorists as Murray Rothbard and Robert Nozick and their adoption of the words 'libertarian' and 'libertarianism'. It has therefore now become necessary to distinguish between their right libertarianism and the left libertarianism of the anarchist tradition." Anarchist Seeds Beneath the Snow: Left-Libertarian Thought and British Writers from William Morris to Colin Ward by David Goodway. Liverpool University Press. Liverpool. 2006. p. 4.

^"Within Libertarianism, Rothbard represents a minority perspective that actually argues for the total elimination of the state. However Rothbard's claim as an anarchist is quickly voided when it is shown that he only wants an end to the public state. In its place he allows countless private states, with each person supplying their own police force, army, and law, or else purchasing these services from capitalist venders...so what remains is shrill anti-statism conjoined to a vacuous freedom in hackneyed defense of capitalism. In sum, the "anarchy" of Libertarianism reduces to a liberal fraud."Libertarianism: Bogus Anarchy" by Peter Sabatini in issue #41 (fall/winter 1994–1995) of Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed.

^Sartwell, Crispin. "Introduction of The Practical Anarchist: Writings of Josiah Warren". Archived from the original on 30 April 2011. Where utopian projectors starting with Plato entertained the idea of creating an ideal species through eugenics and education and a set of universally valid institutions inculcating shared identities, Warren wanted to dissolve such identities in a solution of individual self-sovereignty. His educational experiments, for example, possibly under the influence of the Swiss educational theorist Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi (via Owen), emphasized – as we would expect – the nurturing of the independence and the conscience of individual children, not the inculcation of pre-conceived values.

^British anarchists Stuart Christie and Albert Meltzer manifested that "A.S. Neill is the modern pioneer of libertarian education and of "hearts not heads in the school". Though he has denied being an anarchist, it would be hard to know how else to describe his philosophy, though he is correct in recognising the difference between revolution in philosophy and pedagogy, and the revolutionary change of society. They are associated but not the same thing." Stuart Christie and Albert Meltzer. The Floodgates of Anarchy